It’s an old topic; but I often came across some clients who know the importance of search engine optimization always worrying about being penalized. First of all, for most sites, it’s not easy to rank well on competitive terms or to be penalized by search engines.
Being penalized means your site is out of the search engine index, viz. no one could ever reach you through organic search. A quick way to check if your site is not penalized is to use “site:” command. e.g. “site:www.rockyfp.com“; if it returns no results, too bad!
Google recently offered advice:
Now you can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Log in to your Webmaster Tools account. Under Tools, click on “Request reconsideration” and follow the steps. Make sure to explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.
“site:” is a very useful command; I’ll share more about this if you are interested.